my first ride with a night train (City Night Line)

… was horrible.

last night I took the City Night Line from Munich to Bonn and I booked a seat instead of a cabin bed because journey time was only 6 hours and it was the cheapest ticket.
But whose idea was it to arrange about 60 seats in one waggon without any subdivisions? Trying to sleep in this seat was worse than any hostel dormroom I’ve been so far, especially because the train stopped many times during the night with people walking through the corridor between a lot of snoring old men.

My advise: If you should ever book a night train in Germany, pay attention that you book a seat or a bed in a subdivided cabin to avoid that described noisy environment. I know it for the next time!

http://www.waymate.de →

a nice website which is easy to use to find the cheapest train tickets in Germany and some countries around

only one stupid thing about it: important international connections like Thalys, Eurostar etc. are still missing

Is travelling with DB always too expensive? Not really - especially if you book in advance.

Here you can see an example how I could get from Bonn to Stockholm including a 2day-stop in Copenhagen for only 36€ (with BahnCard25-discount, so normally it would be 49€) on a day 2 months in advance. So that 36€-ride would actually be 2 rides but you only pay once.
You can mention stops in your request that can last up to 48 hours, the same would work for Bonn-Hamburg-Stockholm, Bonn-Berlin-Warsaw, Bonn-Wien-Budapest, Bonn-Munich-Zagreb, … just to mention some examples. Prices for these connections start at 39€ (with BC25: 30€).

If you book one of those connections 93 days in advance, you’ll get the best chance to get a ticket for the lowest prices, but 49 or 59 euros would also be okay. It’s more difficult to get these tickets for high demanded connections like Cologne/Frankfurt-Paris, Frankfurt-Zurich or Munich-Wien. You’ll get the highest chance for connections to Copenhagen/Stockholm, Poznan/Warsaw, Lyon/Marseille or Ljubljana/Zagreb!

sometimes it’s nice and a bit of luxury to be driven alone by a big vehicle, but most of the time it’s just boring.

I wish more people in my home region would use public transport so the quality and supply of train or bus services wouldn’t become even worse than today